As always, I like to greet you with my smiling face, and this picture is when I got off the train 3 hours from Tokyo to go to the Sony factory. However, that is not where I am now.
I am flying back from Japan on an ASA flight to LAX. Although I left at 5:10pm, I will arrive on the same day at a little after 11am. The Japan flight is the best because the actual flight time is “only” 10 hours. While is long, it is nothing like the long flight to Taipei.
I am sitting next to a very famous name. I don’t know the person, but the name is well known and the name is used in a famous company name. This individual works for the world bank, and he is a very talkative person. He proceed to tell me about the dire situation of the worldwide finance metrics, and how the unemployment is really 20% in the USA, and how our real debt makes is at a third world debt level from a relative standpoint.
He then proceeds to tell me how we are at “peak oil productions” (a common phrase that one of my energy exploration friends uses, but this individual doesn’t like), and how energy costs will sky rocket. He then describes that the world economy will collapse, and people are going to start shooting each other to get to each others gasoline in local neighborhoods.
I makes you glad to know that the world bank has such optimistic people.
He then goes on to order an unbelievable amount of whiskey, wine and other alcohol. ASA airlines are very responsive, so they just keep feeding him the drinks.
“I like to drink,” he informs me. Thanks for the hint, I couldn’t tell.
I proceed to tell him that I am in hard drives, and I describe the technology a bit. However, it does make me wonder if hard drives can save the world.
The picture above is my traveling companion and Raymond. Raymond is Hong Kong Chinese that decided to take an adventure to Japan 20 years ago when a Japanese company wanted to hire some Hong Kong guys. He came and met his wife. He has been in hard drives ever since, and as I said, he is helping us change the world.
The secret to having a good economy, classically since the 20th century, is making sure that you have the following things:
1. Cheap food
2. Cheap labor
3. Cheap energy
What most people don’t realize is that with the change to the information age, cheap computing is becoming the fourth rail. And while we don’t measure computing, hard drives are the heat of this.
Hard drives provide massive amounts of storage virtually for free. It is as if you wanted to have all the free oil and energy, and somebody invented a machine to deliver just that. Only in our case, it isn’t energy, it is storage. And storage, of all your bills, of all your records, or all your information, provides an incredible amount of labor to be saved.
However, this is not my serious blog, so I will give you more pictures of my trip.
Here I am standing outside of Toshiba. The weather had taken a turn for the hot, and I started to realize that I was uncomfortably sweaty. Luckily, it didn’t last too long, and we moved inside to have a good meeting.
After Toshiba, we need to continue to our next customer. So while lunch was in order, we had little time to get to it. Japan to the rescue. As previously described, each stations tends to have quite a few small restaurants in them. This one served sorba, which is a cold noodle that you dump into a type of broth.
There were no chairs, and everybody would simply stand up and eat their lunch. The woman that cooked the noodles did not take money. You would buy a ticket from a vending machine once you got into the small restaurant, and then hand her the ticket. This way, she never touched money, and one person could simply cook and be done.
We went on to have our next meeting, and once we were done, Nagata-san was going to treat us to a real Japanese business meal for dinner, Torimatsu.
Behind me is the restaurant, and although I can’t tell the name, Nagata-san said that it is “Chicken Name of Owners.” So, if I ran the place, it would have been called “Chicken Theologic,”
The place is only about 8 feet across, and 25 feet long. You sit at a counter, and unlike most places, you can smoke. The owner cooks up a variety of heaven skewered meats and mushrooms over a special bed of charcoal. David and I said it was the best meal of the the trip.
The old owner was happy to have his picture taken, and flashed me the V for Victory sign. He cooked to the left of the picture, and charcoal smoke filled the place even though he had a fan. It smelled great.
His wife was much more embarrassed, and tried to hide from the camera. However, I snapped a picture when she wasn’t looking.
The next day, we met with our last customer. I was very excited to be done with this trip. Not because is wasn’t enjoyable. I have a job that is intrinsically interesting and fun. However, being away from the wife is a lonely prospect.
I was quite lively at the table, asking some silly questions to our customers (who laughed a lot) like “What is your favorite movie? Do you play golf? How many children do you have.” The language is always tough, but simply questions always drive good talk.
We went out for our final night of dinner to a restaurant that served a very authentic European food. It was heavy on the meats, and probably caused all my arteries to clog. However, we went with the sales team, and we had a lot of fun.
The size of the finally sausages were amazing, and I simply couldn’t eat all the food, but neither could anybody else.
Rather than going to bed, I watched the final 5 episodes of Haibane Renmei. This put me to bed at around 1:30am. This is uncommon for me, but the plan is for me to try and stay up all the flight time to LAX and into the evening. If I can do this, then I can go to bed very early, and hopefully get back on a good schedule. I always find that stay up for a long time, then getting a long night’s sleep is best for me.
Regardless, I am going home and I am glad. However, after all this food, I am hating to get onto the scale. Of well, the damage is done. The diet starts tomorrow.
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